It’s been a while since I posted, but The Boston Globe’s recent piece on the backroom discussions leading up to Romneycare sparked a thought in my head that drove me to shove the piles of papers, magazines and Val-Packs off the Blogotron 2000.
The thought is this: that what may ultimately bring Mitt Romney down, isn’t his position-shifting, his parsing of facts, his blowin’-in-the-wind principles — rather that his base and party shifted right under his feet. A seismic shift that turned what should be his one proud shining gubernatorial moment – the Mass. health insurance reform law – into a Titantic anchor around his neck.
As we read in the Globe article, Romney considered the individual mandate for health insurance to be the “ultimate conservative idea.” And it was, if you use the 2006 definition of “conservative.”
And therein lies Romney’s problem (and exposes the basic hypcricies of so many members of the GOP). What was “conservative” from 1994- 2006 is vastly different than what is considered conservative in this crazy post-Obama/Tea Party world.
In 2006, being conservative really meant you supported Big Government in that Ronald Reagan kind of way. Conservatives of 2006 supported the Patriot Act, started multiple wars, ran up massive deficits, trried to intervene in the life of a comatose woman, and wanted to tell you who you can fall in love with, and what type of family planning services you can receive. About the only thing Conservatives didn’t want to stick Big Government’s nose in was corporate America (thank you very much, by the way, that worked out just dandy.)
Back then, Ron Paul was just some crack-pot Congressman from Texas. Don’t forget, as recently as 2008, Fox News didn’t even want him in their presidential debates, and went out of their way to censor his message.
It was Democrats who were then (and still are) accused of being the Party of Big Government, with their welfare programs, and their hate-crime legislation, and their dagnabit insistance on regulating the air and inspecting food.
And when Democrats wanted a universal health law, the Republicans would have none of that! Keep the government out of our health care, they shouted. Newt Gingrich, the leading conservative at the time, went so far to say:
I am for people, individuals–exactly like automobile insurance–individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance.
It was under this definition of Conservatism that Mitt Romney backed the individual mandate for health insurance coverage in Massachusetts. It was government-mandated personal responsibility.
But then some lady from Alaska makes a few pitbull hockey mom comments, and those unregulated investment banks fail, and unemployment skyrockets, and that Obama fellow gets elected, and then average folks suddenly realize that large national debts aren’t a good thing, and that maybe we shouldn’t spent tens of billions of dollars bailing out Wall Street, and then that Obama fellow teams up with the Pelosi lady to propose death panels for Grandma and suddenly Mitt Romney is on the wrong side of the San Andreas Fault.
In the end it won’t be Mitt’s statements from 1994 that he’ll do more to advance gay rights than Ted Kennedy, or touting his family history of protecting a woman’s right to choose, or flopping on the assault weapon ban, or any of the other policy shifts, that doom his candidacy.
Instead, his candidacy is doomed because of the biggest political flip-flop of the past 20 years: the redefinition by the GOP base of what it means to be a conservative.
Today he is a Democrat, not because his values or ideas shifted, but because the party for which he proudly worked as a young man shifted so far to the right he became a moderate Democrat without becoming a different human being in any way. Kind of like political redistricting, that.
Some evidence that the nation is moving rightward is that the GOP posits an idea, the Dems embrace it, then the GOP rejects it. Examples include both the health care mandate and cap and trade. Heck, the EPA and OSHA were created under Nixon’s administration.
I’m not so sure “rightward” is the best description for the phenomenon you succinctly summarize here.
More “partisan” or “libertarian” maybe? But, as highlighted by the decline in “family values” as a leading talking point and the rise of “fiscal conservatives”/the Tea Party, the national political dialogue has become less “socially conservative.” I think.
I see the GOP’s “conversion” to opposing the individual mandate and cap/trade as primarily pragmatic, political decisions. Before the Great Recession of Fall 2008-2009, it seemed clearer that the U.S. health care system and climate change were among if not the most pressing national political issues. Not having a proposed “solution” to these issues was considered indefensible. So, the individual mandate and “cap/trade” became the GOP’s go-to “solutions” for these issues. Each far preferable – to GOP base’s anti “Big Government” and free market promoter s – to the leading “liberal solutions” on these issues (“single payer”/Medicaid expansion and a “carbon tax”.)
Then, as you note and as the Great Recession lessened the momentum for dealing with the big issues of healthcare/the environment, the Democrats (though not our party’s most “liberal” base) largely adopted the individual mandate and cap & trade. Again, though, I see these as more pragmatic than considered policy decision. With momentum waning, replicating Romney Care is much better than doing nothing to reform the health care system. With “the economy” and “the deficit” resurging, cap/trade (and an improved regulatory system to go along with it) seems much better than doing nothing to address global warming.
The ultimate rejection of these proposal by the GOP just showed that they made a decision they were now winning the debate and could afford to argue against the very pragmatic solutions the GOP believed were necessary to embrace before the Great Recession. The 2010 elections only reinforced the efficacy of that approach.